HDD Pricewatch: Prices won’t return to pre-flood levels anytime soon

Share This article

With HDD factories ramping production back up after the floods this fall drive shortages should ease off this quarter. Prices will also be coming down — but the long-term impact of the event could reverberate through the market for the rest of the year.

The floods have given manufacturers an opportunity to upgrade manufacturing lines and change product mixtures as they repair damaged factories. Take a look at the numbers, and we’ll show you what we mean.

The Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB was going to be the hot ticket this time around — until we spotted the CG 2TB flavor. We’ve not been tracking this drive to date, but the current $114 price tag makes this the best 2TB option — provided you don’t mind the 5400 RPM spindle speed. More encouraging for mainstream users is the price drop on WD’s Caviar Black; $199 is the cheapest that drive has been since the original price hike.

The 1TB drives from Samsung and Seagate somewhat buck our trend at $159 and $139, but these are likely to fall in the coming weeks, while two of our three mobile drives have also slipped downwards in the past 30 days. The graph below shows current drive prices relative to their pre-flood prices. Both of the external drives we were previously tracking have gone out of stock, possibly for good. Similarly, the VelociRaptor 600GB — Western Digital’s premiere and fastest enthusiast-class hard drive — has vanished from the majority of resellers.

The slow road back

As part of writing this article, we spoke with Kris Kubicki of Dynamite Data, a real-time data analytics company. Dynamite Data tracks the shipment of thousands of products — including hard drives — across the entire United States. One of the common trends across manufacturers is the elimination of a number of older SKUs. This suggests that as HDD companies bring their factories back online, they’re taking the opportunity to kill off older products that weren’t very profitable.

This doesn’t easily explain why so many externals have vanished or where the VelociRaptor 600GB went, but it’s too early to tell which drives are simply out of stock and which have been EOLd. Some products may reappear in cost-optimized, single-platter configurations, others may be introduced with new features.

There are two other reasons why drive prices aren’t coming down more quickly. First, it’ll take time for OEMs and resellers to replenish their inventories, and second, the HDD manufacturers themselves have good reason not to pump the channel chock full of hardware. By keeping prices high and tightening inventory controls, they ensure that HDD prices won’t immediately freefall back to pre-flood levels, earning themselves a healthy bit of revenue in the process.

The rate of return is likely proportional to the initial degree of increase and the drive’s original performance class. As the chart above shows, WD’s Caviar Black is only 33% more expensive now than it was in Q3, while the Caviar Green is still carrying an 83% price premium. Pricing on 5400 RPM 2TB HDDs from WD and Seagate (not listed) has fallen much more quickly than the 7200 RPM flavors.

The SSD revolution that wasn’t

After the floods hit, there were wide predictions that we’d see a jump in SSD sales, but this doesn’t appear to have happened. SSD sales grew significantly in 2011, but there’s not much evidence that consumers or OEMs turned to them as a substitute for HDDs. This was likely due to a still-enormous price gap in terms of price-per-gigabyte.

The availability of external drives at relatively low prices may have blunted the chances of a widespread switch. USB 3.0 externals are very nearly as fast as internal drives and the floods themselves were widely portrayed as a one-time price shock rather than a long-term change. It’s possible that the majority of customers who would’ve bought a larger drive for additional capacity either contented themselves with an external or resolved to wait until spring.

Is it time to buy?

Up until now, we’ve recommended readers absolutely avoid buying a new drive unless they’ve had no other option. At this point, we’d lessen that a bit. If you’ve got an urgent need for a high-performance HDD like the Caviar Black, it’s still selling for a premium — but you aren’t being taken to the cleaners. Alternatively, if you can get by on a 5400 RPM drive, the 2TB Caviar Green is a painfully acceptable option.

If you don’t really need a new drive, we’d still recommend waiting until later in the year.

Tagged In

Post a Comment

thank you for this article! i JUST bought a drobo last week and was contemplating some new drives…

Anonymous

Glad I bought my HDs when they were sub-$60. 8-)

http://profile.yahoo.com/Y6JSYHPKIZGUU3U4AOXFZ5IKQY Gary

Noted that there were no HGST hard drives listed in your article! Why is that?

Joel Hruska

Gary,

When I decided to put together a short list of representative models back in October, I selected from a range of popular products. The external HDD I included until it was EOL’d was a Hitachi.

I picked drives that were representative of the overall market, included retail and OEM products, then included results from multiple manufacturers. Generally speaking, drive manufacturers match their prices very closely. It boiled down to trying to keep a small dataset that gave an idea of what trends looked like — I supplement by spot-checking Newegg, which is why the 2TB 5400 RPM drives made an appearance this time around.

http://profile.yahoo.com/MZ6ECKOWXNHPBUWTQKTSXRDONY Dennis

funny prices did go up another 10 % here the past 3 months theres no sign of price drops!
this whole flood crap is a complete myth everyone in the supply chain is just ripping you off and increasing there profits.there has never bin a sign of shortage because there was LOADS of disk stored in warehouses that are no still sold expencive while bought cheaply.as always the consumer is the only one that gets screwed by these actions.i need 3 2tb drives but im not buying them till they return to the old 71 euro for 2tb instead of the 116 euro it is now.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.